SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain(iwantmyname.com) |
SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain(iwantmyname.com) |
Sure...you can move it to a subdomain and if all goes well, great. If not you can cite a Matt Cutts video to say who could have known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk
If the organic traffic matters then trust people who are actually affected (http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomai...) and figure out another (yes, much more involved) way to deal like reverse proxying if you have other demands to contend with.
Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages, but Google indexed it a metric shit-ton of times, and then added each of them to the index, and THEN it penalised us for "spamming."
I came in, removed it completely, and set up a robots.txt so it couldn't happen again. But the penalties and 404s will take up to a year to completely clear out of Google's end.
Funnily enough Bing hasn't penalised the site at all, and we're the number 3 rank for relevant search terms on there (2nd page on Google).
And for a site thats been a round for a while only having 100 404's is low - most site owners are v bad at tidying up old defunct urls and using script kiddie platforms like joomla and magento dont help.
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
> Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages
You could redirect them all to the canonical location for those pages.
If the arrow is where you made you change to blog., what was the penalty? A very, very slight downtick in traffic from July -> August?
Maybe you meant to say you made the switch in June?
You are correct in stating this was only a slight drop in impressions. In this case I would say this is Googles fuck up. The algorithm is not mature or smart enough to see that the blog was moved.
In the author's case, they moved to sub domain for easier maintenance. The article ended with a transparent way of keeping the old URLs and correctly improving the tech behind the scenes.
Be careful of changes, even if endorsed by Google, when things are working. More often than not, there'll be a mistake, you send the wrong signal to Google, and you take a hit. Only do it, IMO, when there's nowhere to go but up :)
There's probably a publication bias here. When people change things and traffic goes up, they don't run to tell the world about it.
Though anecdotally, I have a lot of reference-type content that has been bubbling up over the years seemingly solely because it hasn't changed at all in 7 years. The big players like to refresh their design and layout every few years.
In my experience, we've had more bad than good with URL changes.
The interesting part is that often a "URL cleanup" would result in a quick "boost" in traffic/rankings, but would continually slump, often even unrecoverable after reverting.
There are a lot of very good reasons to have your blog on the same domain and relatively few to have it on a subdomain. The extra traffic outweighs any benefit to putting it on a subdomain.
On what level is my interpretation wrong?
* parents * love interest * fashion * social group
In a sense we all do it all the time. "Gaming the system" and what have you.
Are you telling me that the drop of 4K views was entirely attributed to getting fewer hits from Google searches? What happened to the bounce rate?
let's do a wittgenstein. do not use the word penalty. a penalty is when you look into google webmaster tools (of all your protocol & subdomains & domains variation and you have a message, that you have a penalty.
go on, look into
https://iwantmyname.com
http://iwantmyname.com
https://www.iwantmyname.
http://www.iwantmyname.com
http://blog.iwantmyname.com
.. other subdomains ..
this and your mention in your post of the worst bloodsucking (a.k.a. toolselling) "seo" publication ever leads me to the first issue: you are reading SEO blogs! stop it. do not reed SEO blogs, ever. you will reduce your understanding of google as soon as you start reading SEO blogs. there are 400+ specs and recommendations directly by google of what you have to do to perform well in google, read them first.
the issue at hand is: you got traffic for your blogpost content before the move, then you moved it to another protocol + subdomain combination, you got less traffic, with no positive trend. this was not the desired traffic behaviour.
this was the issue.
your hypothesis is that the traffic drop has to do with the move as the is a strong timely correlation. sound sensemaking.
first of all, be honest in what you did: you
* from a quick view i would say your blog pages are majority of your pages
* you changed the URL of the majority of your pages
* you changed the subdomain of the majority of your pages
* you changed the protocol of the majority of your pages
additionally the minority of the pages has only a very poor interlinking to the majority of the pages (only the blog start page is ever linked)
additionally the blog content seems to be high quality content, while on the subdomain-less site you seem to have lots of very poor content landing pages (duplicate with a hint of text templates) targeting the different domains suffixes https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com+Easy+...
google now has two statements
* I) a priori: another protocol/subdomain == another domain independet webproperty
* II) google can deal with webproperties split over differnt domains / protocolls if it can determine that they belong together.
the big question is now - did google see the new subdomains as part of the iwantmyname.com webproperty.
well, let's look at site:iwantmyname.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com&pws=0... y
google is rewriting their snippet headlines to your pages to have " - iWantMyName" in there. if i do a site:blog.iwantmyname.com" https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.iwantmyname.com&... i get a lot " - Domain Blog" in the search snippets.
why is this, well basically your blog start page link points to the blog start page and has the underlying text "Domain blog" your titles are not as recommended by google (see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#3 section "brand your titles")
the title issue should have been a major warning. we could probably find much more if we would have google webmaster tools access to all the subdomains (protocols) and subdirectories.
but the biggest warning was the "we did not regain traffic" issue. but - based on your blog post - the thing you did was, you waited? and well, here we are with the bullshit and SEO blogs topic again where they quite often state, that it "can take a while" whereby they mean an undefined timeframe of 3 to 4 months plus. this is evil. if you do a change and you want to see a positive impact it does not take longer than 2 weeks to see a positive or negative trend. anybody who says something else is just lazy. (note: additionally i could not find any sitemap.xml which well indeed slows down the whole domain migration process, this should have been fixed first and is recommended by google again and again for URL changes and domain moves)
so what is the point of this rant:
* do not read SEO blogs
* do not read SEO blogs
* read google specs (in your case: titles, sitemaps, site moves, ..)
* don't use the word penalty
or post a thread on the google webmaster forum, actually they are quite helpful there.
sadly a lot of people are not very good at prioritising information intake, that is why i stick with my "do not read SEO blogs" recommendation.
the logic behind this is actually quite simple
let's say: x% of everything written in Z is bullshit (incl. deprecated or no longer valid).
let's agree that if Z is "seo blogs" then x is higher compared to the case where Z is "google recommendation", then it is always a better investment to read an item of x if Z is "google recommendation".
i would place the values of x something like this
if Z is "seo blogs" then x is 80
if Z is "google recommendation" then x is 20
if we substitute "with a pinch of salt" with "flamethrower" then yes.
(google) analytics is an unbelievable powerful tool that has at some companies whole teams dedicated to it
google webmaster tools is a unbelievable powerful tool that tells you 80% of everything that is wrong with your site. you can easily make it your half time job to use this tool to the fullest.
google is part of the triangle: your webproperty, the users, google search
your ressources are better invested into these three areas (analytics, webmaster tools, google recommendations) than in a third party with its own interest i.e.: selling tools
in the public discourse every poor performance is a "penalty" so this word has lost all it's meaning.
if your site is preforming poor (your desired state of traffic != the traffic you have) you do not - per se - have a penalty. if everything is a penalty, nothing is a penalty.
on SEO blogs everything is a penalty, sometimes with %stupid cute animal name here% prefix. this nomenclature really should not spread over to this otherwise great forum.
It's true that they should have used 301s or rel=canonical or something in the past, but that also sounds like the least of their past problems, if I'm reading the parent comment right. Right now, I don't think they'd be much better off with 301s to a single URI that 410s instead of just directly serving 404s for everything, even though the 301 to a 410 is more right in some abstract sense.
Simple rule for SEO or any online marketing is 'always test for yourself.' be it Google's info you're working off or Search Engine Journals. Blogs can provide a good starting point for non-professional SEOs who don't have the time or resources to do external domain tests. I've been in the game over 7 years now, Moz has always been a good resource.
You say that as if Google don't have their own interests: encouraging more people to spend on Adwords, sending more clicks to sites using Adsense, sending more clicks to their own properties, encouraging more people to use Google Analytics.
Google don't want to send traffic to your site, they want to sell ads.
>considering how much they've contributed to the industry.
SEO is single most hated online discipline and Moz is the market leader.